An 80s pop star goes back on the road with old songs and new, convinced that he’s still got it. He kicks off his comeback tour in … Brokenwood. Yes, of course someone’s going to wind up dead.
The Brokenwood Mysteries writer-producer Tim Balme knew exactly who he wanted to play James Hathaway, the fluffy, deluded frontman of 80s heartthrobs Stolen Arrow – and he wouldn’t go ahead if he couldn’t get his man. That might not be easy, because Michael Galvin is usually very busy playing Dr Chris Warner on Shortland Street.
“I made sure he could be excused from Shortland Street at the time we needed him before writing it. If he wasn’t available, I would’ve shelved it.”
It probably helped that both shows are made by South Pacific Pictures. It also helps that Balme and Galvin went to drama school together and before they both started on Shortland Street, they harmonised as the Everly Brothers in the hit Ken Duncum play Blue Sky Boys.
So Balme knew Galvin could sing, and that he was an aficionado of 80s music. Dr Warner, famously a fan of the Dunedin Sound bands he saw as an Otago med student, might not have approved of the tunes, but the episode, The Ghost in You, is a particularly entertaining opener for Brokenwood’s 11th season.
In part that’s because the creative work has gone beyond the script. Balme and the show’s resident composer, Joel Haines, wrote three songs for the fictional pop group – and they are quite good.
Balme asked Galvin for five 80s favourites and chose a Psychedelic Furs song as a music reference point and as the episode’s title. When it came to singing, says Galvin, “once I got on stage it was a case of just attempting to indulge those repressed rock star fantasies all at once. You only really see me on stage for a couple of minutes total, but rest assured I loved every second of it.”
Recording the songs in a studio was “another fantasy fulfilled”, says Galvin. And Stolen Arrow’s fictional hit, Gifted, is “actually a really great song – I can say that because I didn’t write it”.
Gifted also gets a cheesy but convincingly retro music video. But is the singer in the Stolen Arrow video Max Forbes, who plays a younger Hathaway in other scenes, or a digitally de-aged Galvin? It’s hard to tell.
“It’s a mix of both. Max was terrific, but given the retro look of the 80s video it was a great opportunity to deploy some VFX to enhance that feeling of a younger Michael Galvin,” says Balme.
The episode’s director, Mike Smith, has form in the era. Way back in 1984, he created Heroes, a TVNZ series about an 80s pop band trying to be famous (“Synth and leopard skin abound,” records website NZ On Screen) which starred Michael Hurst and Jay Laga’aia.
For Stolen Arrow superfan Peggy (it’s no spoiler to say that she is the murder victim), played by Julie Edwards, Balme looked to Cyndi Lauper for style tips and fleshed out the character with fan stories he’d heard over the years.
The effort seems to have paid off. Brokenwood fans in North America, where Acorn TV has already streamed the new season, have given it the episode’s second highest-ever rating on IMDb – although they presumably didn’t get the joke about Timaru. But for such a fun story, The Ghost in You is also pretty dark, even for a show where someone dies every week.
“This is the Brokenwood sweet spot,” says Balme. “Cosy and fun, but we always get to a serious place when the murder and motive come to light. Murder is a serious thing, after all. The truth of the story, the tragedy, is the thing that anchors the show.”
The Brokenwood Mysteries, new season on TVNZ 1, Sunday, June 15, 8.30pm; and TVNZ+
